Secrets of the Threshold

Schmidt Number: S-2810

On-line since: 5th June, 2006

Lecture
V

I
should like to help everyone understand, if I can, the
characteristics of the spiritual realms we are studying in these
lectures. For this reason, I am going to add a little story to shed
light on the questions we have already considered and on those ahead
of us.
( 13 )

Some time ago Professor Capesius was
inwardly quite disturbed and puzzled. It came about in the following
way. You will have noticed in
The Portal of Initiation
that Capesius is a historian, a professor of history. Occult research has
shown me that a number of well-known modern scholars have become
historians through a particular connection with an Egyptian
initiation in the third post-Atlantean epoch, either directly within
an initiation cult or else by being attracted in some way or other to
the Temple Mysteries. You will notice that Capesius is a historian
who depends not only on external documents; he tries also to
penetrate to the historical ideas that have played a part in human
evolution and in the development of civilization.

I must admit that in characterizing Capesius in
The Portal of Initiation,
The Probation of the Soul,
and
The Guardian of the Threshold,
I was continuously aware of his link to the Egyptian cult of initiation
shown in detail in Scenes Seven and Eight of
The Souls' Awakening.
We must keep in mind that what Capesius's soul experienced during his
Egyptian incarnation forms the foundation for his later destiny and
for his present-day soul. Capesius has therefore become a historian,
concerned in his professional life chiefly with what has been brought
about in successive epochs by the varying character of peoples,
civilizations and individuals.

One day, however, Capesius came across some literature
about the philosophy of Haeckel. Up to then he had not paid much
attention to these ideas, but now he studied various articles on
Haeckel's atomistic view of the world. This was the reason for his
tortured state of mind; a peculiar mood descended on him when he met
this atomistic philosophy at a relatively late period in his life.
His reason told him: We really cannot get behind natural phenomena
properly unless our explanations involve atoms by way of a
mechanistic conception of the universe. In other words, Capesius came
more and more to recognize what is, in a sense, the one-sided
correctness of atomism and a mechanistic view of nature. He was not
one to fight fanatically against a new idea, for he had confidence in
his own intelligence, which seemed to find these ideas necessary to
explain the natural phenomena around him. Yet it troubled him. He
said to himself, “How desolate, how unsatisfying for the human
soul this conception of nature is. How poorly it supports any ideas
one would like to acquire about spirit and spiritual beings or about
the human soul!”

Capesius was thus driven back and forth by doubt;
therefore he set out — almost instinctively, I might say —
on the walk he so often took when his heart was heavy, to the Baldes'
little cottage. Talking over things with those warmhearted people had
many times provided him with a real emotional lift, and what Felicia
Balde gave him in her wonderful fairy tales had refreshed him. And so
he went there. As Dame Felicia was busy in the house when he arrived,
he met first his good friend Felix, whom he had gradually grown fond
of. Capesius confided his troubles to Felix, describing the doubts
that the knowledge of Haeckelism and the atomistic theory had
brought. He explained how logical it seemed to apply it to the
phenomena of nature, but on the other hand how barren and
disheartening such a conception of the universe is. In his distress,
Capesius more or less sought help for his state of soul from his
fatherly friend.

Now Felix is quite a different character from Capesius.
He goes his own unique way. Turning aside at once all Haeckel's ideas
and theories, he explained how the matter really stands. He said:
“Certainly there must be atoms; it is quite correct to talk
about them. But we have to understand that atoms, in order somehow to
form the universe, must stratify and arrange themselves in such a way
that their relationships correspond in measure and number; the atoms
of one substance form a unit of four, another of three, another of
one or two; in this way the substances of earth came about.”

It seemed to Capesius, who had a good grasp of history,
that this was somewhat Pythagorean. He felt that a Pythagorean
principle had the upper hand in Felix, who was arguing that there is
nothing we can do about the atoms themselves but that within them we
find the wisdom of measure and number. More and more complicated
became the argument, with ever more complicated numerical
relationships, where — according to Felix — cosmic wisdom
in combining the atoms revealed itself as a spiritual principle among
them. More and more complicated became the structures that Father
Felix built up for Capesius, who gradually was overcome by a peculiar
mood. You could describe it by saying that he had to strain every
nerve so much in deciphering this complicated stuff that, even though
the subject interested him immensely, he had to suppress a desire to
yawn and to sink into a kind of dream state.

Before our good professor dropped completely into a
dream, however, Dame Balde joined them and listened for a while to
the expounding of numbers and structures. She sat there patiently,
but she had a peculiar habit. When something not altogether pleasant
or congenial bothered her, and she had to control her boredom, she
would clasp her hands together and twirl her thumbs around each
other; whenever she did this, she was able to swallow her yawns. And
now after she had twirled her thumbs for a short time, there came a
pause. She could finally try to stir up Capesius with a refreshing
story, and so Felicia told her good friend the following tale.

Once upon a time there stood in a very lonely region a
great fortress. Within it lived many people, of all ages; they were
more or less related to one another and belonged to the same family.
They formed a self-contained community but were shut off from the
rest of the world. Round about, far and wide, there were no other
people nor human settlements to be found, and in time this state of
things made many of the people uneasy. As a result, a few of them
became somewhat visionary, and the visions that came to them might
well, from the manner in which they appeared, have been founded on
reality.

Felicia told how a great number of these people had the
same vision. First, they saw a powerful figure of light, which seemed
to come down out of the clouds. It was a figure of light bringing
warmth with it as it came down and sank into the hearts and souls of
the people in the fortress. It was really felt — so ran
Felicias' story — that something of glory had come down from
the heights of heaven in this figure Of light from above.

But soon, Felicia continued, those who had the vision of
light saw something more. They saw how from all sides, from all
around the mountain, as though crawling out of the earth, there came
all kinds of blackish, brownish, steel-grey figures. Whereas it was a
single figure of light coming from above, there were many, many of
these other forms around the fortress. Whereas the figure of light
entered into their hearts and their souls, these other beings —
one could call them elemental beings — were like besiegers of
the fortress.

For a long time the people, of whom there was a fairly
great number, dwelled between the figure from above and those
besieging the fortress from outside. One day, however, it happened
that the form from above sank down still further than before, and
that the besiegers come closer in towards them. An uncomfortable
feeling spread among the visionaries in the fortress — we must
remember that Felicia is telling a fairy tale — and these
visionaries, as well as all the others, fell into a kind of dream
state. The figure from above divided into separate clouds of light,
but these were seized upon by the besiegers and darkened by them, so
that gradually the people of the fortress were held in a dream. The
earth life of the people was thereby prolonged for centuries, and
when they came to themselves, they found that now they were divided
into small communities scattered over many different parts of the
earth. They lived in small fortresses that were copies of the great,
original one they had inhabited centuries before. And it was apparent
that what they had experienced in the ancient fortress was now within
them as strength of soul, soul richness and soul health. In these
smaller fortresses they could now bravely carry on all sorts of
activities, such as farming, cattle raising and the like.

They became capable, hard working people, good farmers,
healthy in soul and body.

When Dame Felicia had finished her story, Professor
Capesius felt as he usually did, pleasantly cheered. Father Felix,
however, found it necessary to provide some explanation for the
images of the story, for this was the first time Felicia had told
this particular tale. “You see,” Felix began, “the
figure that came from above out of the clouds is the luciferic force,
and the figures that came from outside like besiegers are the
ahrimanic beings....” and so on; Felix's explanations became
more and more complicated. At first Dame Felicia listened, clasping
her hands together and twirling her thumbs, but finally she said,
“Well, I must get back to the kitchen. We're having potato
pancakes for supper and I don't want them to get too soft.” So
she slipped away.

Capesius sank into such a heavy mood through Felix's
explanations that he no longer could listen properly and though he
was really very fond of Father Felix, he could not altogether hear
what was being explained.

I must add that what I have just been relating happened
to Capesius at a time when he had already met Benedictus and had
become what one could call his pupil. He had often heard Benedictus
speak about the luciferic and ahrimanic elements, but though Capesius
is an extremely intelligent man, he never could quite fathom these
remarks of Benedictus. Something seemed to be missing; he could not
begin to understand them. So this time when he left the Balde
cottage, he turned over in his mind the story of the fortress that
multiplied itself. Almost every day he pondered the tale.

When he later came to Benedictus, Benedictus noticed
that something had taken place in Capesius. Capesius himself was
aware that every time he recalled the story of the fortress, his soul
was peculiarly stirred within him. It seemed as if the story had
worked upon his inner being and strengthened it. Consequently he was
continually repeating the tale to himself — as if in
meditation. Now he came to Benedictus, who perceived that the forces
of Capesius' soul had been newly strengthened.

Benedictus began therefore to speak about these things
in a special way. Whereas earlier Capesius — perhaps because of
his great learning — would have had more trouble grasping it
all, he now understood everything extremely well. Something like a
seed had fallen into his soul with Felicia's story and this had
fructified his soul forces.

Benedictus said the following. Let us look at three
different things: First, consider human thinking, human concepts, the
thoughts that a person carries around within himself and ponders when
he is alone to help him understand the world. Everyone is able to
think and to try to explain things to himself in complete solitude.
For this he doesn't need another person. In fact, he can think best
when he shuts himself up in his own room and tries as best he can, in
quiet, self-contained pondering, to understand the world and its
phenomena.

Now then, said Benedictus, it will always happen to a
person that a feeling element of soul rises up into his solitary
thoughts, and thus there will come to every individual thinker the
tempting attraction of the luciferic element. It is impossible for
someone to ruminate and cogitate and philosophize and explain
everything in the world to himself without having this impulse coming
out of soul sensitivity as a luciferic thrust into his thinking. A
thought grasped by an individual human being is always permeated to a
great extent by the luciferic element.

Capesius had earlier understood very little when
Benedictus spoke about luciferic and ahrimanic elements, but now it
was clear to him that there must lurk in the solitary thoughts a
person forms in himself the allurements of luciferic temptation. Now,
too, he understood that in the human activity of individual thought
Lucifer will always find a hook with which he can snatch a human
being out of the forward-moving path of world evolution; then,
because a person separates himself with this kind of thinking from
the world, he can be brought to the lonely island that Lucifer —
himself separated from the rest of the cosmic order — wants to
establish, setting up on that island everything that separates itself
into a solitary existence.

Benedictus, after directing Capesius's attention to the
nature of lonely, personal, inner thinking, said, Now let us look at
something else. Consider what writing is: a remarkable factor of
human civilization. When we look at the character of thought, we have
to describe it as something that lives in the individual human being.
It is accessible to Lucifer who wants to lead our soul qualities out
of the physical world and isolate them. This solitary thinking,
however, is not accessible to Ahriman, for it is subject to the
normal laws of the physical world — that is, it comes to life
and then passes away. Writing is different. A thought can be put into
writing and snatched from destruction; it can be made permanent. I
have sometimes pointed out that Ahriman's effort is to reclaim what
is alive in human thinking as it goes toward destruction and to
anchor it in the physical sense world. That is what typically happens
when you write something down. The thoughts that otherwise would
gradually disperse are fixed and preserved for all time — and
thus Ahriman can invade human culture.

Professor Capesius is not the sort of reactionary who
wants to forbid the teaching of writing in the early grades, but he
understood that with all the books and other reading matter people
are piling up around themselves, the ahrimanic impulses have entered
the evolution of human culture. Now he could recognize in solitary
thought the luciferic temptation, in what is written or printed, the
ahrimanic element. It was clear to him that in the external physical
world, human evolution cannot exist without the interplay of
ahrimanic and luciferic elements everywhere in everything. He
realized that even in our forward-moving evolution, writing has
gained greater and greater importance (and to recognize this, one
does not have to be clairvoyant but need only look at the
developments of the last couple of hundred years). Ahriman is
therefore continually gaining in importance; Ahriman is seizing more
and more influence. Today when the printed word has acquired such
immense significance — this was quite clear to Capesius —
we have built great ahrimanic strongholds. It is not yet the custom
(spiritual science has not brought things completely to the point
where the truth can be openly spoken in public) that when a student
is on his way to the library, he would say, “I've got to hole
up and cram for an exam in such and such a subject down at Ahriman's
place!” Yet that would be the truth. Libraries, great and
small, are Ahriman's strongholds, the fortresses from which he can
control human development in the most powerful way. One must face
these facts courageously.

Benedictus then had something more to explain to
Capesius. On the one hand, he said, we have the thoughts of the
individuals, on the other, the written works that belong to Ahriman —
but between them there is something in the center. In whatever is
luciferic we have a single whole; men strive after unity when they
want to explain the world to themselves in thought. In what is
written, however, we have something that is atomistic. Benedictus now
disclosed what Capesius could understand very well, for his mind and
heart had been so enlivened by Dame Felicia's tale.

Between these two, solitary thought and writing, we have
the Word. Here we cannot be alone as with our thinking, for through
the spoken word we live in a community of people. Solitary thinking
has its purpose and a person needs no words when he wants to be
alone. But speech has its purpose and significance in the community
of other human beings. A word emerges from the solitude of the single
individual and unfolds itself in the fellowship of others. The spoken
word is the embodied thought but at the same time, for the physical
plane, it is quite different from thought. We need not look at the
clairvoyant aspects I have mentioned in various lectures; external
history shows us — and being a historian, Capesius understood
this very well — that words or speech must originally have had
quite a different relationship to mankind from what they possess
today.

The further you go back into the past, you
actually come — as occult research shows — to one
original language spoken over the whole world. Even now when you look
back at ancient Hebrew — in this regard the Hebrew language is
absolutely remarkable — you will discover how different the
words are from those in our own languages of western Europe. Hebrew
words are much less ordinary and conventional; they possess a soul,
so that you can perceive in them their meaning. They themselves
speak out their inner, essential meaning. The further you go back in
history, the more you find languages like this, which resemble the
one original language. The legendary Tower of Babel is a symbol of
the fact that there was really once a single primeval human language;
this has become differentiated into the various folk and tribal
languages. That the single common language disintegrated into many
language groups means that the spoken word moved halfway towards the
loneliness of thought. An individual does not speak a language of his
own, for then speech would lose its significance, but a common
language is now found only among groups of people. Thus the spoken
word, has become a middle thing between solitary thought and the
primeval language. In the original common language one could
understand a word through its sound quality; there was no need to try
to discover anything further of meaning, for every word revealed its
own soul. Later, the one language became many. As we know, everything
to do with separation plays into Lucifer's hands; therefore as human
beings created their different languages, they opened the door to a
divisive principle. They found their way into the current that makes
it easy for Lucifer to lift human beings out of the normal progress
of the world, foreseen before his own advent; Lucifer can then remove
them to his isolated island and separate them from the otherwise
progressive course of human evolution.

The element of speech, the Word, finds itself therefore
in a middle state. If it had been able to remain as originally
foreseen, without Lucifer's intervention, it would belong to a
central divine position free from the influence of Lucifer and
Ahriman; then, in accordance with the progress of the divine world
order, mankind could have set sail on a different current. But
language has been influenced on the one side by Lucifer. While a
thought grasped in solitude is the complete victim of the luciferic
forces, the Word itself is laid hold of only to a certain extent.

On the other hand, writing, too influences
language; the further mankind progresses, the more significant is the
effect of the printed word on spoken language. This comes about when
folk dialects, which have nothing to do with writing, gradually
disappear. A more elegant kind of speech takes their place, and this
is even called “literary speech.” The name indicates how
speech is influenced by writing, and you can still notice how this
happens in many localities. I am often reminded how it happened to me
and my schoolmates. In Austria where there are so many dialects all
mixed up together, the schools insisted on the pupils' learning the
“literary speech,” which the children to a great extent
had never spoken. This had a peculiar result; I can describe it quite
frankly, for I myself was exposed to this literary language over a
long period of my life, and only with the greatest effort could I get
rid of it. It sometimes even now slips through. Literary speech is
peculiar in this: that one speaks all the short vowels long and all
the long vowels short, whereas dialect, the language born out of the
spoken word, pronounces them correctly. When you mean the Sonne,
“sun” that is up there in the sky, dialect says
d'Sunn. Someone, however, who has gone through an Austrian school is
tempted to say, Die Soone. Dialect says, der Sun for
Sohn (“son”); the school language says der Sonn.

English

German

Dialect

Literary
Speech

sun

Sonne
(short vowel)

Sunn
(short)

Soone
(long)

son

Sohn
(long vowel)

Sun
(long)

Sonn
(short)

This is an extreme example from an earlier time, of
course, but it illustrates my point.

You see how writing works back on the spoken language:
it generally does work back on it. If you look at how things have
developed, you will find that language has already lost what grows
out of the earth and soil and is most vital, most elemental, most
organic; people speak more and more a book language. This is the
ahrimanic element in writing, which continually influences the spoken
word from the other side. However, someone who wants to go through a
normal development will easily notice from the three things
Benedictus gave Capesius as examples, how senseless it is to wish to
eliminate Ahriman and Lucifer from human evolution.

Consider these three activities: solitary thought, the
spoken word, and writing. No sensible person, even when he fully
recognizes the fact of Lucifer's influence on thinking and Ahriman's
influence on writing, will wish to root out Lucifer where he is so
obviously at work, for this would mean forbidding solitary thought.
Admittedly, for some people this would be a most comfortable
arrangement, but chances are that none would be willing to advise it
openly. On the other hand, we would not want to do away with writing.
Just as the positive and negative electric charge indicates a
polarity in external physical nature, we will also have to agree that
the contrasting ahrimanic and luciferic elements have also to exist.
They are two polarities, neither of which we can do without, but they
must be brought into the right relationship to measure and number.
Then the human being can move between them in the middle ground by
way of the spoken word — for indeed the Word was meant to be
the vessel for wisdom and insight, the vehicle of thoughts and mental
images. A person could say, “I must so train myself in using
words that through them I allow everything self-willed and merely
personal to be corrected. I must take into my soul the wisdom that
past ages have unlocked out of the word.
I must pay attention not
only to my own opinion, not only to what I myself believe or can
recognize correctly through my own ability, but I must respect what
has come down through the various cultures, through the efforts and
wisdom of the various races in human evolution.” This would
mean bringing Lucifer into the right relationship to the Word. We
would not do away with isolated thinking but, realizing that the
spoken word belongs to the community, we would try to trace it back
through long periods of time. The more we do this, the more we give
Lucifer his rightful influence. Then instead of merely submitting to
the authority of the Word, we protect its task of carrying earth
wisdom from one epoch of civilization to the next.

On the other hand, if someone fully understands the
matter, he must take it on himself not to submit to the rigid
authoritarian principle that belongs to writing — whether it be
most holy in content or completely profane — for otherwise he
will fall victim to Ahriman. It is clear that for the external
materialistic world we have to have writing, and writing is what
Ahriman uses to detach thinking from its course toward destruction;
this is his task. He wants to hold thinking back from flowing into
the stream of death: writing is the best means of keeping thoughts on
the physical plane. In full consciousness, therefore, we must face
the fact that writing, which carries the ahrimanic element in itself,
must never gain the upper hand over mankind. Through our vigilance we
must keep the Word in the middle position, so that on the left and on
the right — both in our thinking and in our writing — the
two polar opposites, Lucifer and Ahriman, are working together at the
same time. This is where we should stand and it will be the right
place if we are clear in mind and heart that there must always be
polarities.

Capesius took hold of all this that he
heard, with his soul forces strengthened by Felicia. His attitude to
what Benedictus was explaining was quite different now from earlier
explanations that Benedictus had given him of the luciferic and
ahrimanic elements. Fairy tales flowing out of the spiritual world
were more and more fructifying the forces of his soul, so that
Capesius himself perceived how inwardly strengthened and fortified
his soul capacities had become. In Scene Thirteen of
The Souls' Awakening
this is represented; a soul force within Capesius
designated as Philia appears to him as a spiritually tangible being,
not as a merely abstract element of his soul. The more Philia becomes
alive in his soul as a real being the more Capesius understands what
Benedictus expected from him. At the time when he had first heard the
enlivening story of the fortress that multiplied itself into a great
number of such buildings, it did not at first affect him. In fact, he
almost began to slumber; then when Father Felix was talking about the
atoms, he really was practically asleep. Now, however, with his soul
so matured, Capesius recognized the threefoldness inherent in the
whole stream of world evolution: on one side the luciferic solitary
thought, on the other, the ahrimanic writing, the third, the middle
state, the purely divine. He now understood the number three as the
most significant factor in cultural development on the physical
plane; he surmised that this number three can be found everywhere.
Capesius viewed the law of number in a different way than before;
now, through the awakening of Philia within him, he perceived the
nature of number in world evolution. Now too, the nature of measure
became clear: in every threefoldness there are two polarities, which
must be brought into an harmonious balance with each other. In this,
Capesius recognized a mighty cosmic law and knew that it must exist,
in some way or other, not only on the physical plane but also in
higher worlds. We shall have to enlarge upon this later in more
precise descriptions of the divine spiritual world. Capesius surmised
that he had penetrated to a law acting in the physical world as
though hidden behind a veil and in possessing it, he had something
with which he could cross the threshold. If he were to cross the
threshold and enter the spiritual world, he must then leave behind
him everything stimulated merely by physical experience.

Number and measure — he had learned to feel what
they are, to feel them deeply, to fathom them, and now he understood
Benedictus, who brought up other things, at first fairly simple ones,
to make the principle fully clear. “The same predominance of
the triad, of polarity or opposition in the triad, of harmonious
balance,” Benedictus told Capesius, “is found in other
areas of our life. Let us look from another point of view at
thinking, mental images, or ideas. First of all you have mental
images; you work out for yourself the answers to the secrets of the
universe. The second would be pure perception; let us say, simply
listening. Some people are more likely to ponder about everything
introspectively. Others don't like to think but will go around
listening, will receive everything through listening, then take
everything on authority, even if it's the authority of natural
phenomena, for there is, of course, a dogma of external experience,
when one is pushed around willingly by the superficial happenings of
nature.”

Benedictus could soon show Professor Capesius also that
in lonely thinking there lies the luciferic attraction, whereas in
mere listening, or in any other kind of perceiving, there is the
ahrimanic element. But one can keep to the middle path and move
between the two, so to speak. It is neither necessary to stop short
at abstract, introspective thinking wherein we shut ourselves away
within our own souls like hermits, nor is it necessary to devote
ourselves entirely to seeing or hearing the things our eyes and ears
perceive. We can do something more. We can make whatever we think so
inwardly forceful that our own thought appears before us like a
living thing; we can immerse ourselves in it just as actively as we
do in something heard or seen outside. Our thought then becomes as
real and concrete as the things we hear or see. That is the middle
way.

In mere thought, close to brooding, Lucifer
assails man. In mere listening, either as perception or accepting the
authority of others, the ahrimanic element is present. When we
strengthen and arouse our soul inwardly so that we can hear or see
our thoughts while thinking we have then arrived at meditation.
Meditation is the middle way. It is neither thinking
nor perceiving. It is a thinking that is as alive in the soul as
perception is, and it is a perception of what is not outside man but
a perception of thoughts. Between the luciferic element of thought
and the ahrimanic element of perception, the life of the meditating
soul flows within a divine-spiritual element that alone bears in
itself the rightful progress of world events. The meditating human
being, living in his thoughts in such a way that they become as alive
in him as perceptions of the outside world, is living in this divine,
on-flowing stream. On his right are mere thoughts, on his left the
ahrimanic element, mere listening; he shuts out neither the one nor
the other but understands that he lives in a threefoldness, for
indeed life is ruled and kept in order by number. He understands,
too, that between this polarity, this antithesis of the two elements,
meditation moves like a river. He understands that in lawful measure
the luciferic and ahrimanic elements must be balanced in meditation.

In every sphere of life the human being can learn this
cosmic principle of number and measure that Capesius learned after
his soul had been prepared through Benedictus's guidance. A soul that
wants to prepare itself for knowledge of the spiritual world
gradually begins to search everywhere in the world, at every point
that can be reached, for the understanding of number, above all the
number three; it begins then to see polar opposites revealed in all
things and the necessity for these opposites to balance each other. A
middle condition cannot be a mere flowing onward, but we must find
ourselves within the stream directing our inner vision to the left
and to the right, while steering our vessel, the third, middle thing,
safely between the left and right polarities.

In recognition of this, Capesius had learned through
Benedictus how to steer in the right way upwards into the spiritual
world and how to cross its threshold. And this every person will have
to learn who wants to find his way into spiritual science; then he
will really come to an understanding of the true knowledge of higher
worlds.